News.com.au is the Australian equivalent of ... well, think of the worst newspaper in your respective country and you might come close. These are the guys who posted a story about a record breaking diamond ring sale on eBay and used "carrots" instead of "carats."

But anyway, you are correct: (02) 8011 3871

Phone rings once and the answering machine tells you to leave your name and number and to email your details to a specific email addy.

They really lowered the bar on that one if that's all they could come up with.

Won't mean a thing at hiring time. All they'll find are people willing to spend a few mental amperes goofing around with a puzzle. At best, they'll get someone who will skive off all day surfing crossword puzzle sites and luminosity.com. More likely, they'll find someone with an autism spectrum disorder who will insist he's a good driver and make precipitous exits from meetings because it's ten minutes to wapner.

tillerman35:Won't mean a thing at hiring time. All they'll find are people willing to spend a few mental amperes goofing around with a puzzle. At best, they'll get someone who will skive off all day surfing crossword puzzle sites and luminosity.com. More likely, they'll find someone with an autism spectrum disorder who will insist he's a good driver and make precipitous exits from meetings because it's ten minutes to wapner.

This isn't much of a puzzle to anyone who understands the notation. And solving it is so simple that once you know what the subscript "36" means, it is a one liner in python.

Basically, if this is the "test", it is pathetic anyway and just a publicity stunt. Or maybe an indication of a really bad field in software engineering.

Yeah. It took me about 10 seconds to realise that the 36 subscript meant base-36 and another 20 seconds to google a base-36 converter.

I guess the reason that they believe "no one has managed to crack it yet." is that anyone with an IQ high enough (probably about 90) doesn't want to work for the type of twat who thinks that's a brain teaser.

Or maybe plenty of people have called and the business just wanted some free publicity. I guess none of the journalists could figure it out.

I refuse to believe there is a single person even remotely qualified to work as a software engineer that didn't figure out that "code" in under a second and calculated the phone number in the 10 additional seconds it took to google a javascript base converter.

Ghryswald:News.com.au is the Australian equivalent of ... well, think of the worst newspaper in your respective country and you might come close. These are the guys who posted a story about a record breaking diamond ring sale on eBay and used "carrots" instead of "carats."

It's a Murdoch website, so it is comparable to the worst news source(s) in my country.

/not a math person, still managed to figure out the number (had to use an online converter to decimal, because, well, not a math person)//if the job's in Australia, what's the point of the country code? When I was living there I don't recall having to dial the country code when calling my ISP in Sydney from Perth...